We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

I'm biased, so I can't really talk, but I know many people who turn down gainful employment because they're either lazy or want a higher paying job so they can live more luxuriously than they would with sad job. Obviously the whole 99% thing is more a statement than a true statistic, and I recognize there are people who legitimately can NOT find work, but there are plenty who can, but still choose to live beyond their means or make other decisions that force them into worse situations.

For the others, I recognize the situation, but what is the solution? Communism?

That was an interesting study. I would tend to believe that everyone wants to make 75K a year but not everyone will. Some of us were fortunate enough to have folks that left some money behind, other took risks and the risks paid off and others were in the right place at the right time.

@Anoutsider: Why should it be about Communism? I think that's irrelevant when companies are driving up the cost services everyday. So do you call the energy companies Communists for raising the cost of fuel? Do call American companies Communists for send work to overseas company? Have you looked at the cost of vehicle insurance lately??? or Homeowners' insurance???

Please don't mistake me for being a hater because I think our system of business (Capitalism) has created some of the problems. By lowering overhead, eliminating the cost of insurance and salaries by sending everything to China for production. This trend had caused a shift and soon that shift will come back to American when the rest of the world becomes too expensive to produces goods and services. Going back the VolkerP's post some people may have good reason to be upset and others may be taking advantage of the situation. Just my two pennies.

Whoa, whoa. I didn't say anything about we should be communists. My comment was in jest and more represented the fact that we don't really seem to have many "solutions" proffered. I wouldn't want to be a communist society if that's what you feel my comment implied.

I'm sympathetic to many of the issues (especially with regard to affordable healthcare!) but then I question why there are comments such as:

We are getting kicked out of our homes.

Click to expand...

The brutal truth is that too many people took on more than they could afford, gambling that the bubble wouldn't burst. It's a free society and no-one was forced into taking out a big mortgage.

And as for:

We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all.

Click to expand...

Part of our problem is undoubtedly that we want low cost products but higher wages for ourselves. There's not enough American ingenuity adding value to make people want to pay for a quality product....excepting Tesla of course. :wink:

I would tend to believe that everyone wants to make 75K a year but not everyone will

Click to expand...

I actually would be pretty upset if I were paid so little after all of my schooling, though until just recently, I lived quite happily on less than half of that. An interesting thing though. These people complain about not getting jobs, but in some sectors like power engineering, there is such a shortage in qualified people, that most of the positions are being filled by people from china, india, and the mid-east. At the company I work for, they are hiring like mad, but very few positions are being filled by US citizens.

At the company I work for, they are hiring like mad, but very few positions are being filled by US citizens.

Click to expand...

Good point. Free market is about finding supply for any demand that arises. Unemployed US citizens are, therefor, a symptom of the market mechanisms not working. Either one has to embrace freedom to the very extend (=It's OK that positions are filled from abroad) or one has to call for a corrective factor for the market ("Make that U.S. occupied jobs!"). The latter is a task for politics - to pick up the desires of people and act according to that. Now which U.S. party is qualified to listening to the people I don't know.

There should be a law to prevent companies from hiring people from outside the country in which they operate because it's not fair to hire cheaper workers from somewhere else.
There should be a law to prevent 1% of the population from making more money than 99% of the population.
If products are produced cheaper outside the country, then importation of those products should be banned.

Or perhaps all of those unemployed that studied english, journalism, philosophy, and other things that they really love doing, should have studied engineering instead. It's not just my company I see this. It's all of the IEEE conferences and school enrollments. The grad students are all for the most part foreigners. The Americans don't go into power systems. That's their choice but they shouldn't complain afterwards if they're unemployed.

I do miss the "social justice" part more and more on our free market ...

less then 100 years ago very clever people started companies like Heinz or Boeing (Böing actually :wink and
they made a lot of money , but they also take care of the employes ...

Most big companies these days they are just "human resources" ... a cost-factor ...

Nice story, happend in a car-companie, after decades of negotiations the employes got a profit-sharing ...
the earnings where fine so the employes got realy big bonus, after 3 very good years , and boni the shareholder
started to complain ... if it's really necessary that the employes get thes boni ?!!

absolutly YES ( maybe not that high ), but YES , cause they made the money for the share-holders ...

There should be a law to prevent companies from hiring people from outside the country in which they operate because it's not fair to hire cheaper workers from somewhere else.
There should be a law to prevent 1% of the population from making more money than 99% of the population.
If products are produced cheaper outside the country, then importation of those products should be banned.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I have to wholeheartedly disagree. I've hired designers that were from overseas, are you saying it should be illegal for me to do that?

Are you saying that there should be a law capping how much someone can make?

You're saying we should ban products if their price is cheaper than the same product made stateside?

All of these sound really idealistic and would likely cause more problems than they would solve.

Y'know, if we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels so heavily, it wouldn't be so easy to move manufacturing overseas. We (the US) have really done this to ourselves. It doesn't help that overly centralizing education and allowing it to stagnate through seniority oriented raises and incentives have destroyed the efficacy of that system. People have made bad choices, but the educratic system locked in place by the unions haven't allowed them to get the education they need in order to make better ones.

At the same time, I gave up on doing my own taxes because I realized that the tax code wasn't just gratuitously complex, it was maliciously complex (yes, assuming stupidity over malice - and yes, I do realize how stunningly stupid most of the people sent to W.D.C. are) and that it was that complex so that the old rich white guys could hide all their money. Warren Buffet has a huge point here - nobody earning over $250k/yr should be paying less than the overall average effective tax rate. That's just stupid and greedy, and results in economy destroying backlashes. And the fat cats who claim they are capitalists most certainly are not, because they would scream bloody murder if their corporate welfare was ended (hello, big oil and coal!) - but it won't be, because we have the government they've bought and paid for, in 30 second little blipverts and soundbites. And every candidate will go to Iowa and say ethanol and farm subsidies are good, because nobody has been armed with the education so necessary for freedom from such platitudes.

I consider myself a stauch free-market-ist, but probably not in a way most would recognize. I think the free market system would actually work if all costs were exposed. And where we have an inkling that there might be long-term costs, that's where government should make itself useful and start the process of estimating and iterative refinement. And through that process, extremely long term consequences - which an unrestricted traditional-sense 'free market' would completely ignore beyond the 'tragedy of the commons' event horizon - could be successfully priced in and the market would self correct before something as dire as central California losing it's ability to be a wine-growing region happened.

I also don't think a democracy can self-correct into any sort of reasonable shape once it's left the box. Ours has run off the rails into a weird schizophrenic duality of corporate and individual welfare, in a media accelerated positive feedback idiocracy, and is doomed.

Outsider, I was trying to make a point through absurdity. I simply don't understand what the 99 percenters want. I don't think they know themselves. They just want things to be "fair" and of course that's completely impossible.

Courses in economics should be mandatory. If you raise taxes on people who make more than a million per year, guess how many are going to find ways of shuffling the funds around so they're not "making" a million the next year?

If you reduce the cost of transportation and communication, guess what happens to jobs that don't require a local presence?

We are living through the most rapidly changing technologies in the 50,000 year history of civilization. It is utterly mind blowing! But the majority of the population are trudging through the year with complete blinders on. Perhaps for the best.

Gotcha, I misread the sarcasm (ironic since it just happened to me). I agree with you though. Lots of whining, very little solutions offered up. I know some people who rally behind this, mainly because it's like "hey, if it means more money for me, f**k yeah!" -_-